"But you've never been in England," Sylvia observed.
"Oh yes, I was going there with another English girl, and we lived there three months. I was dancing into a club—a nice club, all the men was wearing smokings—but she was ill and I wanted to be giving her money, so I was going to Russia, and then came the war. And now you must be my sister, because that other sister will be perhaps dead, so ill she was. Ach yes, so ill, so very ill! When I will have my English passport we will go to England together and never come away again. Then for the first time I will be happy."
Sylvia promised that she would do all she could to achieve Queenie's purpose.
"Tell me, why did you call yourself Queenie Walters?" she asked.
"Because the girl who was my sister in England had once a real little baby sister who was called Queenie. Oh, dead long ago, long ago! Her mother, who I was calling my mother, told me about this baby Queenie. So I was Queenie Walters and my sister was Elsie Walters."
"And your real brother Francesco?" Sylvia asked. "Did you ever see him again?"
That dreamlike and inexplicable meeting between the brother and the sister in the streets of Milan had always remained in Sylvia's memory.
"No, never yet again. But I am so sure he is being in England and that when we go there we will find him. And if he is English, too, what fun we will have."
Sylvia looked at these two companions who had both assumed English names. Not even the cold and merciless gray light of the Rumanian morning could destroy Queenie's unearthly charm, and the longer she looked at her the more like an Undine she thought her. Her eyes were ageless, limpid as a child's; and that her experience of evil should have left no sign of its habitation Sylvia was tempted to ascribe to the absence of a soul for evil to mar. The only indication that she was six years older than when they met in Granada was her added gracefulness of movement, the impulsive gracefulness of a gazelle rather than that serene gracefulness of a cat which had been Lily's beauty. Her hair, of a natural pale gold, had not been dimmed by the fumes of cabarets, and even now, all tangled after a night in the train, it had a look of hovering in this railway carriage like a wintry sunbeam. In the other corner sat Lottie, snoring with wide-open mouth, whose body, relaxed in sleep, seemed fatter than ever. She, too, had suffered, perhaps more deeply than Queenie, certainly more markedly; and now in dreams what fierce Bohemian passions were aroused in the vast airs of sleep, what dark revenges of the spirit for the insults that grotesque body must always endure?
At this point in Sylvia's contemplation Lottie woke up and prepared for the arrival of the train at Bucharest by making her toilet.